The Berkeley FrameNet Project
(1998)

FrameNet is a three-year NSF-supported project in corpus-based computational lexicography, now in its second year (NSF IRI-9618838, "Tools for Lexicon Building"). The project's key features are (a) a commitment to corpus evidence for semantic and syntactic generalizations, and (b) the representation of the valences of its target words (mostly nouns, adjectives, and verbs) in which the semantic portion makes use of frame semantics. The resulting database will contain (a) descriptions of the semantic frames underlying the meanings of the words described, and (b) the valence representation (semantic and syntactic) of several thousand words and phrases, each accompanied by (c) a representative collection of annotated corpus attestations, which jointly exemplify the observed linkings between "frame elements" and their syntactic realizations (e.g. grammatical function, phrase type, and other syntactic traits). This report will present the project's goals and workflow, and information about the computational tools that have been adapted or created in-house for this work. 1 I n t r o d u c t i o n The Berkeley FrameNet project 1 is producing frame-semantic descriptions of several thousand English lexical items and backing up these descriptions with semantically annotated attestations from contemporary English corpora 2. 1The project is based at the International Computer Science Institute (1947 Center Street, Berkeley, CA). A fuller bibliography may be found in (Lowe et ai., 1997) 2Our main corpus is the British National Corpus. We have access to it through the courtesy of Oxford University Press; the POS-tagged and lemmatized version we use was prepared by the Institut flit Maschinelle Sprachverarbeitung of the University of Stuttgart). The These descriptions are based on hand-tagged semantic annotations of example sentences extracted from large text corpora and systematic analysis of the semantic patterns they exemplify by lexicographers and linguists. The primary emphasis of the project therefore is the encoding, by humans, of semantic knowledge in machine-readable form. The intuition of the lexicographers is guided by and constrained by the results of corpus-based research using highperformance software tools. The semantic domains to be covered are" HEALTH CARE, CHANCE, PERCEPTION, COMMUNICATION, TRANSACTION, TIME, SPACE, BODY (parts and functions of the body), MOTION, LIFE STAGES, SOCIAL CONTEXT, EMOTION and COGNITION. 1.1 Scope of t h e P r o j e c t The results of the project are (a) a lexical resource, called the FrameNet database 3, and (b) associated software tools. The database has three major components (described in more detail below: • Lexicon containing entries which are composed of: (a) some conventional dictionary-type data, mainly for the sake of human readers; (b) FORMULAS which capture the morphosyntactic ways in which elements of the semantic frame can be realized within the phrases or sentences built up around the word; (c) links to semantically ANNOTATED EXAMEuropean collaborators whose participation has made this possible are Sue Atkins, Oxford University Press, and Ulrich Held, IMS-Stuttgart. SThe database will ultimately contain at least 5,000 lexical entries together with a parallel annotated corpus, these in formats suitable for integration into applications which use other lexical resources such as WordNet and COMLEX. The final design of the database will be selected in consultation with colleagues at Princeton (WordNet), ICSI, and IMS, and with other members of the NLP community.